Month: September 2010

From the first strains of “Fire on the Mountain,” the musical influences of Superfrog were pretty clear. But the rest of their opening set New Boston’s Gravity Tavern last Friday was anything but a rehash of jam band talking points. The band segued into a Latin-tinged original, and then flipped to a revved-up cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” A new song, “Round and Round,” was capped with an Eagles-worthy a cappella vocal.

Later, the band wheeled back around to their roots, closing with another Grateful Dead song. But their atypical version of “Shakedown Street” included a streetwise rap and snatches from the 1972 Deodata jazz-pop remake of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

In fits and starts, an artistic force is asserting itself in Manchester. Folk singers at Boynton’s Taproom, Rocko’s perennial metal scene, and recent renegade one-offs at Jillian’s Billiards and the “Old and Bold” show at Milly’s Tavern are all indicators of a growing trend.

The muse is returning to local music. Most recently, it’s happening at a downtown Manchester pool hall.

In his sweeping new biography, Bob Dylan in America, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz discusses one of Dylan’s key influences, Blind Willie McTell. “He was a sponge … who soaked up every kind of music he heard and then expressed it in his own way,” writes Wilentz — much like Dylan.

It’s also true of Dylan contemporary Maria Muldaur. In junior high school, she led two doo-wop groups and was offered a record contract, which her mother nixed.

“She put an abrupt end to my hopeful little rock and roll career, which in retrospect is probably a good thing,” said Muldaur recently from a tour stop in Fredericton, New Brunswick. “The really cool, hip funky music [was] co-opted … Elvis got drafted and replaced with Pat Boone.

When Wan-Tu Blues Band harp player Pete Zona first began performing live, he was constantly searching for an open jam session. In 2004, his girlfriend Brenda Cadieux decided to bring the music to the couple’s favorite bar, the Village Trestle in Goffstown. She organized a surprise birthday party and invited the many musicians Zona had sat in with. “Point being they all had to let Peter play with them,” explained Cadieux recently.

On that day, guitarist Tom Bellerini dubbed him Slutty Pete, because, says Cadieux, “he will play with anyone.” When the participants all agreed the experience was so much fun it should be repeated a week later, the gathering also marked the beginning of an enduring Sunday afternoon tradition. But while the weekly Wan-Tu Blues Band session is one of the most popular in the area, nothing draws a crowd like Slutty Pete’s annual Birthday Jam.

Start with a dose of old-school, Marley-Toots-Tosh reggae and infuse it with everything from Sun Ra Arkestra freak jazz to Steve Vai guitar pyrotechnics. Inventive intersections like these define Spiritual Rez, the Boston-based septet performing at Stone Church in Newmarket on Thursday, Sept. 16.

“It’s a melting pot left and right, a swirling vortex of music that comes together,” says the band’s drummer, Ian Miller.

Over a career of 30-plus years, Lenny Clarke made movies, had a Boston variety show and starred in his own network sitcom. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he hosted the open-mike night at the Ding Ho in Cambridge, a weekly event that launched the careers of Steven Wright, Denis Leary and others — “It was Sodom and Gomorrah with a five-dollar cover,” Bob Goldthwaite, who also got his start there, is quoted as having said.

It was a time, Clarke said recently, when comics were “rock stars. It was unbelievable …the best tables, best champagne, women, drugs, you name it. It was the greatest years of my life. It will never be copied.”

But befitting Clarke’s hometown, referred to in the documentary When Standup Stood Out as “a full-fledged metropolis with a first-rate inferiority complex,” the 57-year-old comic never got comfortable with his success. “In my eyes — I’m a working-class background, poor family — I still haven’t made it,” he says. “I’ll be working ’til five minutes before I drop dead.”

Well, Chris Beard used a more colorful word than ‘frig’ as he watched Ryan Kelly and Smokestack Lightning leave the stage at the C Note Club in Hull, Mass., after torching the house with their version of Robert Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman.” Beard learned from players like Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Buddy Guy; he knew that Ryan was something special.

A few weeks later at the Blues and Brews Festival in Westford, WZLX Sunday Morning Blues host Carter Alan had the same reaction to the 18-year-old guitar slinger. Alan has good ears — in 1981, he was one of the first American DJs to play U2 on the radio — and he made a call that got the band a spot opening for Chris Duarte this weekend at the Bull Run in Shirley.

That’s the way life is these days for Ryan Kelly, who’s barely out of high school but making moves like someone twice his age.

Hushed, restrained, subtle as the slightest breeze — Chad & Jeremy’s trademark sound wrapped crew-cut college folk around early 1960s pop. The pair rode the British Invasion wave with hit after hit — “Yesterday’s Gone,” “Willow Weep for Me,” “If She Were Mine” and their biggest chart-topper, “A Summer Song.”

The whole thing, says Chad Stuart, was an accident, a combination of primitive studio equipment and producer John Barry’s struggles during the making of the duo’s first single in 1963.

“He was the one who got us to whisper, because he couldn’t figure out how to record our drama student voices,” Stuart said recently from his home in Idaho. “We were overdubbing the vocal to ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ and he said, ‘It sounds like a locker room full of football players!’ In the end, he said, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, whisper it!’ We did that sotto voce Lettermen thing and we were screwed from then on out. I mean that was it, wasn’t it?”

It’s safe to say that Huntress was born to sing Elvis Presley songs. At two years old, he was riffing on one of the King’s biggest hits. “‘Burning Love’ were the first group of words out of my mouth,” he says. “My mother and father told me I was shaking the side of the crib singing, hunka hunka burnin’ love.”

A benefit show to raise money for the Boys & Girls Club of Manchester this Sunday at Jillian’s is quickly shaping into a local music revival. Headliner Eden’s Lie holds a legitimate claim to being the city’s longest-running original band, but their last Queen City gig was more than two years ago. Alt rocker Jacob Heal won the New Hampshire Idol competition in 2006, but for the past few years he’s focused on carving a musical career in New York City.

Author

Michael is the primary music and comedy writer for the Hippo, New Hampshire's largest alt-weekly; Michael contributes reviews of current CDs and DVDs, covers concerts large and small, and writes stories about the area music scene. He's a prescient observer of the trends making every word, note and image "local" entertainment. Michael wrote the weekly "Local Rhythms" column for three New Hampshire/Vermont papers: the Eagle Times (Claremont), Connecticut Valley Spectator (Lebanon) and the online Message for the Week (Chester, Vermont) before their abrupt closing on 9 July 2009. He later wrote Local Rhythms for the Compass in Claremont.
Email:mwitthaus@gmail.com